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A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

arstechnica.com

1–10 of 242 posts

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#4
This article should be read by everyone working in open space offices across the world expecting to get decent speed and reliability out of Wi-Fi with more than a dozen people in a single room.

An open space office (or any office) for a company that depends on the Internet for any of its work without Gigabit Ethernet cables sticking out of every workstation is pretty damn foolish.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#5
As somebody who deploys high density wifi for a living I can agree that WiFi sucks. 5Ghz is already super crowded and it's only getting worse. The new LTE over 5Ghz is going to kill 5Ghz I think once it becomes deployed. Some of the cameras in arena run on 80mhz 5Ghz frequency that hop around and can't be channel planned. They are the worst.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#6

This article is all about unwrapping the marketing copy and explaining why it sucks. That's still valuable, but I was hoping for a more technical view on it. Anyone have an article that explains why the systems are as limited as they are?

Read more (page 2) - there is a considerable discussion of channel congestion and interference due to over powered zones and large number of devices.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#9
I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions.

To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental challenges.

In the coming years we'll hear more about 802.11ax, which is thankfully focused on efficiency vs. raw numbers, but likely won't be ratified until 2019/2020.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#10
My day to day happiness quotient shot up the day I ditched my wireless wifi and ran Ethernet cables through my spaces. I'd realized I was constantly noticing wifi issues, and an apple mbp I use for email seems to drop wifi every half hour. But no longer, with them all wired up! Realizing there are USB3 to Ethernet gadgets really hits home how our modern technology is market-driven-dumb and anti-consumer: all modern laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore!
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